The hottest political topic in Turkey these days is the major constitutional amendment the government is cooking up to introduce a “presidential system.” This, in fact, has been the grand ambition of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) in the past few years. But only now, thanks to the political alliance they formed with the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), they can find enough mandates in the parliament — more than 330 seats out of 550 — to realize this major transition.

If this transition takes place, Turkey would be abandoning the European-style “parliamentary system” it has been adhering to since the beginning of the republic in 1923 — or even from the first Ottoman Constitution of 1876. In this system, the president is a nonpartisan head of state, whereas the real executive power lies in the hands of the prime minister. Erdogan had no problem with this design throughout his first decade in power when he himself was the prime minister. Once he decided to run for the presidency in 2012, however, he and his advisers began advocating the “presidential system” and a new constitution that would allow that.

Some Turkish advocates of the presidential system point to the United States as a good example, but this comparison is flawed for various reasons. First, America is a federation made up of 50 states that have their autonomy in many matters, making the overall system quite decentralized. In contrast, Turkey is, and will keep on being, a very centralized state. Moreover, the presidency Erdogan seeks will have astonishing powers that would be unimaginable in America, such as appointing the heads of all universities across the nation. Given the electoral system and political culture, a partisan president is also very likely to fully dominate his own party, which can give him the full control of both the executive and legislative branches. Add to this the large appointment powers envisioned for the president over the high judiciary, what may come out is a system of “unified power” — as critically noted by a former adviser to former Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu. This would be the exact opposite of the system of checks and balances that is built into the American model.

Advocates of the presidential system also argue that it will save Turkey from all the previous ills, from economic problems to terrorism — but this too looks like more propaganda than analysis. They even claim that the presidential system will save Turkey permanently from military coups, whereas other experts think the exact opposite is true. One of them is Shadi Hamid of the Brookings Institution who examines the political models in the Arab world in his notable book, “Islamic Exceptionalism: How the Struggle Over Islam Is Reshaping the World.”